Some months back I organized a dinner on Capitol Hill that brought together some former and current Russian officials with a number of prominent U.S. Republicans and conservatives, including two congressmen, a conservative magazine publisher, some journalists, and others. It didn’t seem like a particularly newsworthy event—just a routine opportunity for some top Washington hands to share views and perceptions with prominent counterparts from another national capital. The fact that the foreign capital was Moscow testified to the fact that I have been concerned about the rising bellicosity in the U.S.-Russian relationship. But then I have been concerned about the bellicosity of American foreign policy generally.
Time magazine, though, saw significance in the dinner far beyond anything I had contemplated. It ran a 1,500-word piece exploring what it seemed to consider an intriguing phenomenon, captured in its headline: “Moscow Cozies Up to the Right.” One thrust of the piece was that Moscow has initiated a “dramatic shift” in its efforts to influence U.S. domestic politics—namely, by cultivating an apparently unsuspecting American conservative movement.
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